Mom

She had called her husband two days earlier while he was on a cross-country college visit with their oldest son.

“Jerry, I felt something. A lump under my arm. I want to get it checked.”

They did. Then came the drive home, winding down their long dusty driveway while her six kids watched — someone mentioned she’d had a doctor’s appointment. Strange that dad went with her.

She has learned some new phrases in the last hours. Stage three. In the lymph nodes. Percentage. Odds.

“Mom. What’s going to happen?”

“We don’t know. I don’t know.”

Surgery happens. Her breasts are gone. Then radiation and chemotherapy. Her hair is gone. Not so long ago, people called her “the pretty mom” or “the skinny mom.” She’s skinnier now — her skin grey, her face drawn — and she walks with her shoulders pulled tightly in, bent forward as if movement is an act of will. Walks outside become too exhausting, and she spends most afternoons in bed. All her children are still in school; she home-schools them. She wants her son to go to Hillsdale College — she’d meant to help him, but now he might not be ready. She has always been a restless sleeper, but now she is too tired to sleep easily, and she is desperate for rest.

“Who took my iPod?” she calls down the stairs.

“Mom, it’s my iPod,” one of the children complains, but laughing.

It’s hers now. It helps her sleep, a deep man’s voice reading to her, reading promises. It’s still playing when she wakes up late at night. In the last few months, she has heard this voice read through the Bible half a dozen times.

“I’m afraid,” she says, but not aloud. “I am in pain, and I’m afraid.”

“Mom?”

“...to deliver their soul from death, and to keep them alive in famine.”

In the garage, he cuts planks with his son for a faux staircase. She volunteered him to  build scenery for the children’s musical because he was a carpenter before he sold software to auto companies. She’d said “Jerry can do that” before they knew she was sick, but you don’t renege on a commitment.

He hadn’t known the automotive industry was about to crash, that Detroit would be a ghost town and he would have his life’s worst year at work. He didn’t know that he would move out of his room because he lays on his bed writing emails and presentations long past midnight and she sleeps poorly enough as it is. He’d thought this staircase would come together, that this piece he’d just cut would fit.

“Shit,” he says. “Damn it.”

“Dad?”

His face slips from angry back to worn.

“It’s been a long year.”

Her friend dies of cancer. She was several years older — brittle but elegant. They’d ridden around in her red convertible: “Hot blondes with a hot car,” they joked.

“Ed,” she whispers to the widower at the funeral. “Ed, I’m so sorry.”

She thinks she will not have to leave Jerry. The news has been good. She is out of bed. A Pentecostal friend asks to lay hands on her and pray health into her limbs. She laughs, but submits. They want to help, and God didn’t send her this illness for her to be selfish with it. Share it — that life is precious when one starts counting days, that her self-reliance has been broken with her body, that “many will see it, and fear, and will trust in the Lord.”

She straps on her prosthetic chest and pulls on a sweater.

“Now I have a perfect figure,” she sometimes jokes.

“Mom, please, we have more curves than you do,” her sons answer. She only smiles.

Her oldest will start graduate school in the fall. She just saw her first daughter’s artwork published in a professional collection. She will cry in May at her second daughter’s wedding, and a few times before getting her ready. She cries easily lately, but laughs easily too. She wants to go back to school soon, to get the art degree she’d been too practical to pursue in college.

She is strong again. She broke her ankle on a camping trip last summer, and took crutches and a protective boot on the next one a few weeks later.

“Your mother’s an iron daisy,” Jerry says. “She’s bridled passion.”

She pulls on waterproof pants and long wool socks. She’s already broken her tailbone once doing this. But she’s still better on the hills than most of her kids. Jerry won’t admit it, but she’s better than him too.

“Snowboards in the car, gang,” she yells. “We’re going.”

In defense of aesthetics

Chances are, your first response when you hear that someone goes to University of Virginia or Notre Dame is — “Oh, I hear the campus is beautiful.”

You might also know that Virginia has a great law program, and Notre Dame is a top medieval studies institute, but that won’t color your perception of the entire university the same way aesthetics will. A number on the Princeton Review rankings is just a number, but green lawns and airy colonial architecture provide an image that stays in the minds of prospective students, donors, and teachers at a whole different level. Which is why Hillsdale should focus its current capital campaign on beautifying the campus.

If Hillsdale wants to be an elite institution, it needs to look like one. The college’s current capital campaign  has two goals — extending campus, and making the existing structures better to look at. The challenge is uniting those goals. Hillsdale needs more spaces that are purely aesthetic. The last building campaign made some strides in that direction. Lane and Kendall are elegant, and the front half of Central Hall looks great  But the other half of campus, built mostly in the ’70s, is all function over style. Compare the high ceilings and decorative empty spaces of the Howard music building or the Grewcock Union with the cramped, dingy feel of the library and Dow science. Simpson, Mac, and Olds have the decor and feel of a bunker, or a prison. Hillsdale should change that.

The college does have practical needs as well — so far in the current campaign, they seem to be winning. The latest project, the huge Biermann track building, is functional. With its industrial aluminum frame, it also looks like a massive pole barn. Hopefully the college doesn’t take the same approach with the new chapel, which is supposed to seat 1,100 people.  

Many of the new projects are necessary. The college does have a housing shortage, so the new dorms are a good idea. It’s also hard to begrudge the planned addition to the Dow Center to give the graduate students a home. But does the sports complex really need a climbing wall? Doesn’t it make more sense to give the ugly visual arts building a facelift before adding a second gymnasium?

The need for aesthetics, however, is not just superficial, or even primarily about the rankings. Hillsdale College is devoted to the pursuit of the “good, true, and beautiful.” Goodness and truth are easier to grasp — professors teach the precepts of them in philosophy, ethics, theology, history, science, and the like. Beauty is more elusive, something understandable but not quite definable and needing concrete examples to really mean anything. It’s difficult to be good in bad company, or to be wise when surrounded by ignorance. In the same way, being surrounded by beauty is necessary to truly understand what beauty is. So yes, the new building campaign, if done right, should help the perception and prestige of the college. Even more importantly, it should help the college fulfill its mission by adding a little more beauty to the lives of the professors and students already here.

Fixing the teeth on the Reagan statue wouldn’t be a bad start either.

Christian humanism

"Of happiness [Aristotle] has indeed said a good deal in the beginning and at the end of his Ethics. I will dare to say—and my censors may shout as loud as ever they please—he knew so absolutely nothing of true happiness that any pious old woman, any faithful fisherman, shepherd or peasant is—I will not say more subtle but happier in recognizing it." —Petrarca, the first great Italian humanist of the Renaissance

Hilary Mantel: Bring Up the Bodies

The top song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1965 was a cover by the British group Herman’s Hermits. It had only one verse, repeated ad nauseum:

“I’m Henery the Eighth, I am.
Henery the Eighth I am, I am!
/ I got married to the widow next door;
she’s been married seven times before,
/ And every one was an Henery,
it wouldn’t be a Willie or a Sam.
/ I’m her eighth old man, I’m Henery,
Henery the Eighth I am!”

It’s a wink at the gruesome fun fact everyone knows about English history — the king who beheaded and divorced his way through six wives in the quest for marital happiness and a son to rule after him. But what if Henry VIII was really a soulful lover, and Anne Boleyn a conniving survivalist? If St. Thomas More died as a stubborn hypocrite, while Thomas Cromwell acted like a decent, albeit opportunistic, statesman. This is the setup for Hilary Mantel’s tightly written novel “Bring Up the Bodies,” a sequel to her lauded 2009 effort “Wolf Hall.”

The year is 1535, and Henry is growing restless with Anne, known to most of Europe as “the concubine.” Catherine of Aragon sits dying in reclusion, cast aside because she had failed to provide the king a son. The Holy Roman Emperor, Catherine’s nephew, watches for a chance to punish Henry. The king of France hovers between alliances while Henry hovers between Anne Boleyn and the pale Jane Seymour. Second verse, same as the first. In the middle sits secretary Thomas Cromwell, a man of low birth whose intelligence, savvy, and bulldog tenacity have made Henry powerful and Thomas indispensable — at least for the time being. Many of the nobility would like Cromwell dead, chief among them the Boleyn family. In this tense situation, Mantel weaves politics, friendship, loyalty, love, desire and revenge into a surprisingly straightforward story arc with an unusual narrative technique, a third person stream of consciousness that still employs the typical third person focus on dialogue and action.

By always referring to Cromwell simply as “he,” Mantel draws the reader close to Thomas’ thoughts and perspective without resorting to the vogue but annoying first person present tense. Cromwell emerges as complex, thoughtful, and humorous — a good man who does bad things for his king. The book’s title refers to the bodies of the men (including Anne’s own brother) beheaded for sleeping with the queen, who met the same fate herself a few days later.

Mantel does not ask the readers to believe that Henry acted justly. He did, after all, hire an executioner before, not after, Anne’s trial. Cromwell believes that Anne and her “lovers” were perhaps not guilty of adultery, but they were certainly guilty of evil and so deserved to serve the king with their deaths. By giving the king and his secretary souls — and portraying the Boleyn’s as sly and promiscuous — Mantel essentially agrees with Cromwell, which makes the novel such a compelling read.

Mantel’s prose style is elevated but accessible. She has done her homework, and claims in the afterword to be giving a careful historical reading of the events. That reading somewhat cuts across both recent scholarship and the popular concept of the lascivious king obsessed with sex and progeny. Alison Weir’s 2010 “The Lady in the Tower” gives a defense of Anne Boleyn as the innocent victim. It’s hard to find an image from the popular Showtime series “The Tudors” that isn’t of someone fornicating.  

Mantel overcomes that temptation. She keeps the bedroom door discreetly closed and leaves us whispering outside with the courtiers, and thus achieves a refreshing novel about people using sex and power as weapons, rather than about sex and power themselves. The occasional grammatical error (use of “who” in place of “whom”) and Mantel’s overuse of vulgarity distract from her otherwise elegant book. The damage, however, is slight, and “Bring Up the Bodies” succeeds both as highbrow entertainment and in sympathetically resurrecting the characters of Tudor history.  

Henry, of course, didn’t have the best luck with Anne Boleyn’s replacement, Jane Seymour, who died just a year after becoming queen. The homely Anne of Cleeves lasted about six months. The beautiful Kathryn Howard lost her head for sharing her body, a la Anne Boleyn. Only the twice-widowed Katherine Parr outlasted Henry, and married her fourth old man, Thomas Seymour, just months after the king’s death. Mantel’s upcoming novel “The Mirror and the Light,” due in May, will follow the king and his secretary through these years, up to the fall from grace and final destruction of Cromwell.